LITERARY REVIEW – JULY 2025
Tag Archives: Books
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – JULY 7 & 14, 2025 PREVIEW
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue features Malika Favre’s “Literary Heights”…
Trump, Congress, and the War Powers Resolution
How we got to a situation where a President can reasonably claim that it is lawful, without congressional approval, to bomb a country that has not attacked the U.S. By Jeannie Suk Gersen
Anne Enright’s Literary Journeys to Australia and New Zealand
The Booker Prize-winning author recommends three works by writers who, thanks to geography, may have never received their due.
What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?
The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education. By Hua Hsu
THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW – SUMMER 2025 PREVIEW
Corporate America’s Ideological Tilt: An Introduction
Rosolino A. Candela, Caleb S. Fuller
Beyond Interest: What May Motivate DEI
Douglas J. Den Uyl
Philosophy, Law and Culture of Liberal Democracy and the Authoritarian Challenge
By Suri Ratnapala
Reviewed by Paul Dragos Aligica
Martin Van Buren: America’s First Politician
By James M. Bradley
Reviewed by Garion Frankel
Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word
By Michael Sonenscher
Reviewed by Richard M. Salsman
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY – JULY 2025 PREVIEW
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY (June 26, 2025): The latest issue features Writing with Light – The 2025 Puterbaugh Lecture, by Guadalupe Nettel
Gaza Voices
Introduction: Eyes of the Pen, Voices of the Cameraby Yousef Khanfar
Writing on War’s Edgeby Yousri Alghoul
They Call It Displacement—In Reality, It’s Hell (This Is My Story)by Nour Abo-Rokb
This Is What I Haveby Shrouq Mohammed Doghmosh
Nun and War (She and War)by Kifah Salama Al-Ghseen
CREATIVE NONFICTION
Ghost by Basem Nabres
Ringtones of My Mobile Phoneby Omar Hammash
DRIFT MAGAZINE – SUMMER 2025 LITERARY PREVIEW
THE DRIFT MAGAZINE (June 24, 2025): The latest issue Fifteen features It’s morning in America. Daphne, chased by Apollo, grows hooves. We live in an age of conspiracism and insincerity. Spring and summer will not follow. Staying below two degrees might be a challenge. It’d be corny to call it Orwellian. We reached the limits of what moral outrage can do. Miraculously, we still made decisions. Acting recklessly. Lining up at the barricades. The more you have, the more you have to protect. Eye contact is everything. Already, the oil field was quieter. Misogyny converts reality. All that love for objects. It sanctifies him. He wore a face that spoke of multiple divorces. She was bitter about her beauty. That’s all in an evening screening. We’re in a definitional war. Publicity beats truth. Art that risks nothing is worth nothing. A negation of the possibility of forgetting. A private fiefdom. A child on whom childhood was wasted. A game of inches. Ask a pundit or professor. There are only so many laughs to be had.
Interviews
“They’re Using Megaphones” | An Interview with Wendy Brown
“Losing Any Claim to Moral Leadership” | An Interview with Nikhil Pal Singh
“We Will Not Win on Our Own” | An Interview with Eman Abdelhadi
“Politics Is Conflictual” | An Interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
“All Sticks, No Carrots” | An Interview with Adam Tooze
Dispatches on the New Regime
Unified Purpose and Total Vision | Our New Department of Justice
State of Exception | National Security Governance, Then and Now
A Bureaucratic and Feminine Mind | The Right’s Misogyny Politics
Brutality and Opacity | Birthright Citizenship Under Attack
Agit-Slop | The White House’s Numbing Aesthetic
A Disaster Big Enough | Climate Policy on Life Support
Competing Moral Visions | Two Paths for Pronatalism
Easy to Exploit | Collapsing the Urban-Rural Divide
Collective Political Activity | Reclaiming the First Amendment
Anti-Anti-Rape | On the #MeToo Backlash
God-Like Confidence | Donald Trump’s Cult of Faith
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – JUNE 27, 2025 PREVIEW
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (June 25, 2025): In this week’s TLS , If all Russian writers are supposed to have come out of Gogol’s Overcoat, then “all American literature”, according to Ernest Hemingway, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”. James Marcus reviews Ron Chernow’s 1,200-page biography of Twain – the Great American Novel seems fated to be twinned with the Great American Door-Stopper.
Inventing a history
How Stalin shaped the Soviet collective memory By Bryan Karetnyk
‘A dear little genius’
Mark Twain and the making of an American literary revolution By James Marcus
Triumph at Camp David, disaster in Iran
Jimmy Carter’s abrasive foreign policy adviser and rival to Henry Kissinger By Edward N. Luttwak
THE PARIS REVIEW – SUMMER 2025 LITERARY PREVIEW
THE PARIS REVIEW (June 24, 2025):
Fanny Howe on the Art of Poetry: “If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down.”
Marie NDiaye on the Art of Fiction: “Oh, no! Reading beautiful books can’t be traumatizing. Seeing awful things can be—but reading? I don’t believe in that at all.”
Prose by Anuk Arudpragasam, Tom Crewe, GauZ’, Zans Brady Krohn, and Joy Williams.
Poetry by Will Alexander, John Berryman, Yongyu Chen, Eugene Ostashevsky, Ricardo Reis, and Nell Wright.
Art by Anne Collier, Celia Paul, and Alessandro Teoldi; cover by Tyler Mitchell.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JUNE 22, 2025
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: The latest issue features ‘Which One of These is the Real Sam Alman?
When the New York Avant-Garde Started a Revolution
In “Everything Is Now,” J. Hoberman recreates the theater, film and music scenes that helped fuel the cultural storm of the ’60s.
The Book Cover Trend You’re Seeing Everywhere
Take a genteel painting, maybe featuring a swooning woman. Add iridescent neon type for a shock to the system. And thank (or blame) Ottessa Moshfegh for getting there early.
On the Silk Road, Traces of Once Bustling Intercontinental Trade
A new book of photographs captures the landscapes, buildings and faces along the route that once conveyed untold wealth between Europe and China.
REVIEWS: BEST SCIENCE BOOKS OF 2025 (NATURE)
NATURE MAGAZINE (June 20, 2025): The best books in science in 2025
The Infrastructure Book
Sybil Derrible Prometheus (2025)
In 1995, a massive heatwave in Chicago, Illinois, took at least 739 lives. The city authorities assumed that a lack of air conditioning was responsible for most deaths, but an investigation attributed them mainly to social isolation. As Chicago-based engineer Sybil Derrible notes in his penetrating analysis of urban infrastructure: “Technology comes and goes, but infrastructure stays because infrastructure is all about people.” Surveying 16 large cities globally, he investigates water, transport, energy and telecommunications networks.
Free Creations of the Human Mind
Diana Kormos Buchwald & Michael D. Gordin Oxford Univ. Press (2025)
Of the physics Nobel prizes awarded since 2000, “no fewer than seven … stem directly from Einstein’s work in 1905 and 1915”, point out historians of science Diana Buchwald and Michael Gordin. Their brief, appealing book discusses the general theory of relativity and quantum theory, but is preoccupied mainly with Albert Einstein’s life, personality and philosophy, especially his complex relationship with war — including the design of the atomic bomb — and pacifism.
Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact
Keith Cooper Reaktion (2025)
Astronomers observed the first confirmed exoplanet in 1992. Some 5,900 are now known, in about 4,500 planetary systems, with around 1,000 containing several planets, according to NASA. No life has been detected yet, showing just “how rare our planet Earth still is” and how “the imagination imbued within science fiction can only carry us so far”, notes science journalist Keith Cooper. His engaging book, based on interviews with writers and researchers, examines what science fiction has got right and wrong, and what science can learn from it.
Yearning for Immortality
Rune Nyord Univ. Chicago Press (2025)
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – JUNE 26, 2025 PREVIEW
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (June 18, 2025): The latest issue features Joan Didion on the couch; Ocean Vuong’s Failure; The Best-Paid Woman in NYC and Olga Turner Tokarczuk and the mycological turn….
The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius by Patchen Barss
The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation – and the Other 99 per Cent by Conor Niland
The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay by Christopher Clarey
The Roger Federer Effect: Rivals, Friends, Fans and How the Maestro Changed Their Lives by Simon Cambers and Simon Graf
Searching for Novak: The Man behind the Enigma by Mark Hodgkinson
Boomers Daily 